Big exhale. This is my first experience with an Aaron Dries book, and it’s… a lot. The story opens with a rescue effort for young Amity Collins, who is lost in the wilderness. The results are equal parts tragic and life-altering leaving Amity deaf and fatherless. Fast forward thirteen years, and Amity, alongside her brother Caleb, decide they’ve had enough of Evans Head, Australia, and decide to travel, ending up in Thailand. A series of events sends them, alongside a few other characters that the reader head hops along to an island called Koh Mai Phaaw to see a local primate-centered tourist attraction.

Once they arrive at the island, everything goes bad. Not pretty bad. Not relatively bad. Real, real bad. What follows is a no-holds barred, ultra-violent(borrowed from the back cover) extravaganza where no character is safe, and Dries doesn’t allow you to look away while he eviscerates and mutilates. Despite the warning the synopsis on the back provides, I found myself ill-prepared for just how gory things would get. There’s a hint given the events of chapter one, but the island visit is truly on another level.

My only complaint comes with the final act of the book. Up until about page 250 or so, the story is enthralling and relatively straightforward. There are hints and subtle elements of the supernatural, but around the third act, things get weird, things get trippy, and for me, things got incomprehensible. Readers who are smarter than I am may find a lot to like here, but there were some things that went over my head.

Something that stands out almost as soon as you open the book is the prose of Aaron Dries. His writing is vivid and even though his descriptions can be downright unsettling, there’s an air of beauty to everything he writes. It didn’t surprise me to learn that Dries works/has worked in nursing and social work. A Place For Sinners would be at home being labeled splatterpunk, but there’s a humanity in the atmosphere throughout the story that doesn’t always show up in comparable works.

While A Place For Sinners didn’t work for me quite as much as I’ve seen it work for others, the writing style Dries employs has me intrigued. This is an author whose other books I’ll be looking out for. Notably, Cut To Care - Dries’ short story collection set to be released next year. A Place For Sinners is now available through Beneath Hell Publishing.